In which life is stranger than fiction.

Sunday, I went to the little bar for drinks and air conditioning.

I met a strange little person there. He has a large trust fund, he went to jail for writing fifteen hundred dollars worth of bad checks at a local gas station, he has a fiancee, and he spent his entire young life from early grade school to the age of 18 “in a juvie facility in Texas.”

“What for?” I asked.

“For blowing my dad’s leg off.”

“Why did you do that?” I asked. “Did he really need it?”

“He raped my mom,” the kid said.

“Oh,” I said.

“I only have a third grade education,” he added. “And I have ADHD.”

He told me that he drank at three different bars on his 21st birthday, and threw up at all three of them. By the second bar, he said, he was puking black bile. (No, I did not ask for these details. They were offered freely and with great enthusiasm.) He passed out with his head in the stool at the Dead Cock, and if you’ve ever seen the bathrooms there you know how drunk that is.

For the first twenty minutes I observed this person, I thought – with that sweet face and those big, luminous blue eyes and that body hidden under loose boy’s clothes – that he was a girl.

In other news, I just read this entry to Truck and he informs me that he knows the creature, that the stories are made up, and that she is a girl. “She is engaged,” he said. “But the rest of it isn’t true.”

God, I love this town!

 

10 Responses to Meeting People Is Always Fun!

  1. Alex says:

    More than once, during my bar fly days, I swooned at the sight of a really cute young guy, only to realize that it was a really cute, boyish lesbian.

    Tastes like… chicken! -m

  2. Nikol says:

    Wow. This stuff is definitely too good to make up.

    I need to get out more.

    Isn’t the world freakin’ kick ass?! I could never come up with this shit! -m

  3. Whenever I ended up listening to psychos like this person I remember the old wisdom, “don’t talk to strangers.” Someone with so much negative energy (even reading about him/her?) pulls you down. I hope you had a good time after all.

    I guess the part about being in juvie her whole life wasn’t made up so I assume the creature has her reasons for being the way she is. I found her rather charming and personable, actually, and I especially enjoyed reading the story to my housemates and watching their faces as they figured out who I was describing! -m

  4. GayProf says:

    Whoa — Back the bus up. You live in a town with a bar that is actually called the Dead Cock??!

    I wish. It’s the Red Rock, but that’s stupid. The restaurant upstairs, the Top o’ the Rock Grille, we call – naturally! – the Tip o’ the Cock. 😉 -m

  5. Jim@HiTek says:

    That’s nothing, there was a guy a LT’s tavern who use to regale people about all the people he’d murdered. Months later he stopped doing it and I kept repeating the stories to women he wanted to go out with so they knew what they were getting into. A couple years later and everyone in the bar protected that asshole as though he had never killed all those people or that he hadn’t told all those stories. Especially the women bartenders. I never did find out it any of the stories were true but I don’t care. You go around telling people about all the people you’ve killed, then I’m going to repeat them to women you want to date…

    (I should have called the cops but always got distracted by a business problem whenever I started to do that.)

    Bowling Jesus works with a pathological liar who does things like blow off work for a week for ‘stomach surgery,’ and then returns with wild stories and no incisions. He’s also killed people and had brain cancer and worked for the CIA and shit. What’s sad is thinking that murder is so neato and admirable that you not only want to add it to your story but you think people will like you for it. -m

  6. bghead says:

    Didn’t he also shave his stomach in an attempt to support the surgery story? Maybe I just dreamt that.

    When I was in the nuthouse 22 years ago I got to hang out with a few hardcore schizophrenics. Those folks have the best stories ever. Computer chip in her clitoris that makes her a nymphomaniac, met the father of Madanna’s unpublicized secret children who is also a CIA spook, some guy that had sex with all the nursing staff, etc. Of course, in that environment, a lot of the murder stories were may have been true: Drowned a little girl in a pool, killed someone because “she was an alien”.

  7. naomi says:

    there’s nothing like pathological liars to make the day interesting. they’re almost as much fun as drama queens.

  8. bghead says:

    Interesting in a morbid sort of way, I suppose. I think of pathological liars as being profoundly sad and lonely people.

  9. Kris says:

    Makes going to the bars even more interesting..

  10. copperred says:

    If it wasn’t for bar lies, I don’t know that it would be as much fun going. Especially if they’re later trying to date your friends and passing themselves off as saints and angels.

    Or cowboys. -m